There's the yarn shop--doing extremely well in our first two months of business, hooray!--and there's Bill, (who needs very little maintenance, but still...), the house, the garden, the laundry (never-ending), and the 1 1/2 dogs:
I know it looks like they don't require my attention, but this is the "after" picture. After the frisbee, after the walks, after the feeding, watering, medicating, playing and cuddling. They are exhausted...and exhausting.
I spend almost every day at the shop--winding yarn, waiting on customers, working up calendars, ordering, and teaching Beginners' classes. I am finding the teaching is the most rewarding part for me. I love being able to share my passion for knitting with newbies, watching them take their first baby steps, picking up new skills and making stuff with their hands. Their enthusiasm ("Look, I made my first hat!") makes it all worthwhile.
When I come home, there are plants to be planted and watered (although the daily thundershowers have been helpful there), dinner to cook, and when I finally sit down, there are samples to knit. For every class I dream up, I have to make sure the pattern works and give everyone a tangible project to get excited about. I have made about eleventy-billion hats in the last month, just for a 4-session class. It's also important to use the yarn that we sell in the shop, for those who need step-by-step direction on a project, and to market our inventory.
It is very much like the cooking classes I used to teach in New York. Some people require a detailed recipe. These people never deviate from instructions, abandon the project if one ingredient is missing. Others are seat-of-the-pants cooks, almost pathologically incapable of following a recipe without changing one or two ingredients or methods. Knitters seem to be the same, either slavishly following a pattern down to the exact yarn, or leaning toward the opposite, casting on "whatever" number of stitches, or choosing to try any yarn that catches their gaze and trying to make it fit into the pattern.
Outside on the porch, I've planted tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, eggplant, rosemary, thyme, sage, cilantro, basil, parsley, cucumbers, lettuce and some asparagus seedlings, destined for a future asparagus bed. In the garden proper, I've got greenbeans, zucchini, yellow squash, watermelon, more cukes, more peppers and sweet potatoes. Bill has been fencing off the garden areas, to protect from critters. Ozzie seems to be the most destructive critter of them all--have you ever seen a dog rush down to the garden to chow down on produce? Ours does. Sigh. No wonder he has such bad gas!
Until next month...
